If you look up during the winter, when all the deciduous trees have dropped their leaves, you might spot something still growing up there, tucked in the bare branches.It might be mistletoe, that beautiful parasite that we smooc
06.06.2023 - 19:59 / gardenerspath.com / Kristine Lofgren
All About Rose Growing HabitsIf you’ve ever tried to disentangle the many different categories of roses, you know it can be a bit, erm, confusing.
Not to get too into the weeds here (who are we kidding, I could talk roses all day!), but when a rose is hybridized, it’s registered with the American Rose Society by the breeder or nursery.
The breeder determines how to classify the new plant, usually classifying in the same category as one of the parents.
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The official classifications according to the American Rose Society are species (or wild), old garden (or antique), modern, hybrid tea and grandiflora, floribunda and polyantha, miniature (or miniflora), climber, and shrub.
So a hybrid created from a tea and a floribunda might be classified as a tea simply because that’s what the individual breeder chose. But it may actually have more qualities that are common to a floribunda type.
As a result, we have a somewhat chaotic classification system in which these plants aren’t classified via any sort of structured method.
But it doesn’t have to be that complicated. Some growers and hobbyists simply group them by their growth habit. Some are climbers while some stay low to the ground, where they spread wide rather than tall. Others grow in that familiar shrub shape that you see in gardens across the globe.
These aren’t official classifications, but they sure are easier to understand and they give you a better idea of how the plant will perform in your garden, which I’d argue is more important than knowing whether it’s a hybrid tea or an antique.
While we’re talking classification, note that a given classification grouping
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